


By a Time to Rise and a Time to Fall

by BecauseWhateverAtAll



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: A Booker & Joe Buddy Movie That They're Both Only Half-Conscious For, A Booker & Joe Buddy Movie That They're Both Wishing They Weren't Starring In, And since they're in a healthy relationship they talk about those feelings, And. Cuddle., Angst with a Happy Ending, Forgiveness, Found Family, Gen, Hurt Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani, Hurt/Comfort, Joe and Nicky have complicated feelings about Booker and Quynh, Kidnapping, M/M, Medical Experimentation, Non-Consensual Drug Use, Protective Nicky | Nicolò di Genova, Protective Team, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-03
Updated: 2020-08-11
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:54:04
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 16,691
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25679185
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BecauseWhateverAtAll/pseuds/BecauseWhateverAtAll
Summary: Forgiveness takes time. Any wise man could tell you that. But maybe sometimes it’s different. Maybe sometimes Booker and Joe aren’t particularly wise. And maybe sometimes it takes a disastrous bit of kidnapping for two brothers to forgive each other and themselves.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia & Booker | Sebastien le Livre, Booker | Sebastien le Livre & Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani & Nile Freeman, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 237
Kudos: 1167





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Hi. I wrote a thing and am posting a thing. Because I love this family and want to e-scream it from the rooftops. I hope you like! As far as warnings, there are some scenes of past deaths, including a hanging at the very end of chapter 1 (NOT self-inflicted). And some pretty dark references to all that. Also, if you're a scientist or doctor, I'm so sorry. I really made some shit up. (Sorry.)

“ _And all the comrades that e’er I’ve had, who are sorry for my going away. And all the sweethearts that e’er I’ve loved, who bid me one more day to stay_ …”

His body woke up quickly. His mind, not so much. Years (and years, and years, and years) of blurry mornings had him trying to trace back whatever he must have drank last night.

“ _But since it falls unto my lot, that I should rise and you should not_ …”

Something strong. Something modern he just wasn’t used to. Something of either highest top shelf or lowest low bar. 

“ _I’ll gently rise and softly call_ …”

It had to be the liquor, it had to be; otherwise why the fuck would Booker be imagining Joe singing folk songs in his bedroom?

“ _Good night and joy be with y_ \- you alive yet, Book?” 

“Jesus, Joe, give me a moment,” he muttered. Hungover hallucination or not, he didn’t care at this point. His headache was-

“Of course, yeah, take your time. But after you’ve had your moment, we should really figure out an escape plan.”

His headache was... what? “What?” 

“Escape. Plan,” Joe over-enunciated, as he always did when he knew Booker was groggy and it would drive him crazy.

It probably shouldn’t have taken opening his eyes for Booker to realize that he wasn’t in his bedroom. He probably should’ve realized by the feel of- well no, it wasn’t the first time he’d fallen asleep on his own floor, so he could cut himself some slack there. But the air was stagnant. Damp. He was somewhere underground and enclosed. It smelled like mildew and metal. Joe’s voice wasn’t just echoing inside his head. “Shit,” he groaned, blinking hard, taking everything in as he rolled onto his back. 

It’d been awhile since he’d been chained up in a dungeon. A good fifty, sixty years maybe. Booker couldn’t say he missed it. Two small cells surrounded by stone walls, stone floors, stone ceilings. The lamps stuck to the walls were a few decades old, but the steel bars and grates that separated him and Joe were brand new. And well-installed.

“Shit,” he said again. He pushed himself up to sit back against one of those stone walls, realizing now that his hands were cuffed behind him. Good cuffs. Reinforced, sealed tight. In the next cell, Joe was sitting in a similar position. There was blood on his face and the neckline of his shirt, but no wounds. 

Wounds.

Andy…

“The others?”

Joe shook his head. Not the tense don’t-ask shake, but the all-clear shake. Booker (still) knew the difference, and he allowed himself a small sigh of relief. “I was heading back from a market. Assholes cost me two bags of groceries in the takedown.” There was more to it than that- there always was- but Joe had been alone when it happened. The others were probably fine.

“When?”

Joe grimaced. “Yesterday. Eighteen hours.” By the shift and roll of his shoulders, Booker was guessing he hadn’t been uncuffed in that time. “Didn’t see them again until they brought you in an hour ago.”

He leaned his still-aching head back against the wall. “And were you singing the whole time?”

He kept his eyes on the ceiling, so he could only guess as to whether or not Joe smiled. He hoped he did. “I think they gassed you, by the way. Pretty sure you were dead when they first dumped you in.”

Gas would make sense, considering Booker couldn’t even remember being attacked. “You recognize them?”

“No. But they sure recognized us,” Joe was clenching his jaw hard when Booker looked at him again. His beard was shorter, he realized then. Neatly trimmed, just a little too thick to be called scruff. His hair was cropped a bit too. Maybe the team had had some sort of undercover job, some high society, tuxedo, champagne flutes kind of thing. Or they’d been staying somewhere with a humid climate; Joe always cut the curls away from the back of his neck when they were living somewhere hot for an extended time, always to Nicky’s only-somewhat-joking protests.

Booker found that he was clenching his jaw too, biting back the foolish bit of _longing_ that swept through him. He shoved it aside. Not now. Not with Joe. “They know what we are?”

“ _Who_ we are,” Joe corrected immediately. He’d never, in all Booker’s time, allowed them to think of themselves as anything other than human. Booker had resented it for so long. “And yes. Or else, maybe they’d never seen what happens when you shoot someone in the head and wanted to test it out with me.”

“Nicky’s going to be very pissed,” he couldn’t help but say. So much for the shoving aside.

“Oh, he’s going to-” but then Joe cut himself off abruptly, as if he’d just remembered who he was talking to. “Yes,” he said instead. And looked away. 

They were both quiet for some time after that.

***

Men came in an hour later, well-armed and well-trained. They didn’t speak, just unlocked Joe’s cell and held him down long enough for one of them to club him hard against the head. Booker shoved himself up to his feet and to the bars. Not to fight, not to yell, but to see as much as he could. It was a mix of training in the way they carried themselves and their weapons. British, American, Iranian, possibly Soviet. But they’d all obviously trained together at some point too.

For this.

He glared at them but said nothing, trying to angle himself for the best view of the hall- narrow, lit much the same as in here, so these caverns went on for a distance (he began listing every city he knew with extensive underground systems)- as the men dragged an unconscious Joe away.

He counted the minutes- thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three- until Joe was returned. Conscious now, more blood on his shirt, his thigh, bruises already fading on his face, but otherwise okay. Still cuffed. Booker waited until the men left to sit next to the bars, as close to him as he could get, eyeing him expectantly. “Well?”

Joe gave an angry grin, showing his teeth. “They want to know where the others are.”

Booker almost laughed. If there was ever a more futile want in all the world, it was to want Joe to endanger the team. “They didn’t take me after. So they must know about…” somehow saying the word ‘exile’ out loud felt wrong. Felt painful. “The state of things.” He paused, lowered his voice. “They would’ve moved safehouses after realizing you were taken, but are- were they nearby?”

Joe quirked one eyebrow, then the other. “I don’t even know where _we_ are.”

“Brussels maybe, or Luxembourg?” he mused. They couldn’t be that far from Paris.

“Doesn’t smell like Luxembourg,” Joe shook his head.

“Doesn’t _smell_ like Luxembourg?”

Another eyebrow quirk, and Jesus, Booker had missed that look. “It’s a very distinctive smell.”

Booker wanted to say out loud how much he missed that look, but he couldn’t. He just- he tried, but it was superimposed over the look on Joe’s face back at the pub. That blank, distanced… he sighed, sitting back a little way from the bars again. And almost missed the way Joe tracked the movement and let out a little sigh of his own.

And they were back to silence.

***

He didn’t allow himself to worry until they hit the twenty-four hour mark since Joe had been taken. “They should’ve found you by now.” 

Joe had just come back from his second interrogation, more breathless and bloody this time. “They’re okay,” was his reply. 

“That’s not what I-” he shook his head. “I was expecting the cavalry to charge in four hours ago.”

Joe opened his mouth, shut it, opened it again, an uncharacteristically wary look on his face. “Why?”

He blinked. “What?”

“Why were you expecting?”

“ _What_?” 

“...Did you have anything to do with this?” 

“Fuck you, Joe,” he spit it out. Hadn’t he been punished enough? Hadn’t he accepted the punishment and stayed away, even though it killed him more slowly and more steadily than anything else on earth ever would? Were they ever going to trust him again? Did Joe really think he could still… If _Joe_ did, did the others as well? Did Andy-?

“I need you to tell me, Book. I need this to not- to not be you.”

Booker stopped. Took a breath. Studied him again. There wasn’t any accusation on Joe’s face, surprising him. Just pleading. Desperation. _I need this to not be you_. And Booker knew it was real. Of all them, Joe was the one who still wore his heart on his sleeve, wore every emotion on his face. “I swear.”

Joe closed his eyes briefly. “When they brought you in, and I was stuck here, it just-” he glanced at Booker, looked away again. “Felt similar.”

He sat forward, not caring that Joe wouldn’t look at him now. “No. I made a-” Not a mistake, _don’t diminish it, Sébastien_. “Bad decision. I know that. I’m owning up to it. I’m going to prove to you that I-” He stopped, watching Joe curl away from him just slightly, just so. Just enough that he’d surely see. “I’ll never do something like that again, Joe.”

It was more than bars separating them. Booker’s hurt and Joe’s hurt were different, and there was too much to- he wasn’t going to be able to convince Joe of anything Joe didn’t want to believe. Joe was a hundred percent in on everything he did and felt; when he committed to something (someone), he committed. And here, he had committed to his hurt, to Booker’s betrayal. 

And Booker… Booker was committed to his grief. 

He was going to live forever, until fate decided otherwise. 

He was going to live alone, because he couldn’t handle fate.

***

“Maybe,” Joe coughed around rapidly healing broken ribs. “Maybe we’re in Paris?”

Booker startled out of his half-nap, his new system of trying to get quick rests in between Joe’s interrogations. (They hadn’t taken Booker yet. Why hadn’t they questioned Booker yet?) “Paris?”

“There’s a lot of underground to Paris.”

He snorted a laugh. “Being held in the catacombs would be infinitely more interesting than this. My guess is still Brussels.”

Joe shook his head. “Too obvious.”

“Too obvious? For what? _How_?” 

“I’m thinking… Oulu,” he nodded resolutely. “Everything’s very temperature-controlled out there. It must be either a very cold or very hot climate outside. We’re due a cold climate this time around.”

"Brussels."

“Oulu."

Booker sat up to face him again. “Loser has to be the one to explain to Andy how we both allowed ourselves to get captured. And sit through the lecture afterwards without making faces.”

It honest to God warmed him when Joe laughed at that, however reluctant it was. “If that’s the wager, when we get back from Oulu I also want a bottle of the finest wine in your pied-à-terre. Nicky likes Cabernet, even if he won’t admit it.”

“There aren’t many bottles at my place,” he admitted. 

That eyebrow went up again. “You’ve given up drinking?”

“No, more that I’ve cleaned out all the closest liquor stores and it takes them a few days to restock sometimes.” 

It was a joke and it was true at the same time, and he knew Joe knew that. Didn’t expect the flash of sadness (of guilt?) on Joe’s face that went with a quiet mutter, “You shouldn’t drink that much without someone there.”

_It’s not like it’s my choice!_ he wanted to shout. But of all the choices made last year, his was still definitely the worse one. So instead he took a deep breath. “I swear,” he repeated. “I’m- I’ve been trying to do right by all of you.” He shrugged. “Mostly getting drunk, but still.”

Joe cracked a bit of a smile, a genuine one, and Booker hadn’t seen it in _so long_. “So really evolving as a person, then?”

“Doing my best,” he was careful to mirror the smile, not go too big. 

“Meditating on life and all its nuances.”

“Doing my best.”

“So how many times have you died of liver failure, do you think?”

“Says the man who died of appendicitis twice.” 

“Every time they cut it out, it grows right back,” Joe shrugged, wincing a little at the pull of sore muscles in his shoulders.

Booker eyed him for a moment, twisting his own wrists as much as he could. “Maybe if we- if we sit back to back? Through the bars? Might be able to find some way of-”

The outer door opened once again, startling them. Too soon, it was too soon. They’d been giving an alternating one or two hours between interrogations, this was only just fifteen minutes. He looked to Joe, got a quick nod in return, and both of them pushed quickly to their feet, waiting for whatever new misery was coming their way.

It occurred to Booker in the time it took for the guards to enter that it hadn’t at all crossed his mind that it could’ve been rescue, Andy and Nicky and Nile bursting in in dramatic fashion. Why hadn’t he? Some part of him assuming he’d be left behind? They’d grab Joe while he was being beaten in the other room, never even showing their faces to him?

Would he blame them?

His thoughts were put on hold, though, by the arrival of a new face. Not a guard, not a trained fighter at all. He swallowed back a stab of panic- the man looked like a scientist. And maybe Joe’s fears of this feeling familiar weren’t so far off?

He glanced at Joe, but Joe was busy glaring at the strange man. Ah. Maybe he was the interrogator. Or at least present for them. 

“Who are you?” Booker demanded.

“Someone did a very good job of cleaning out Mr. Merrick’s lab after you left,” the man spoke as though he hadn’t heard Booker. “But not a perfect job.” He tried not to show how very, very worried he was getting. “There were some interesting notations, some half-formed data and algorithms we were able to recover.” The man was carrying a case that he set easily on the ground, opening slowly. “The late doctor studying you had already started to make a neurological breakthrough, particularly with the amygdala and hippocampus.” He looked up then with a smile. “The parts of your brain that deal with memories.”

And what a goddamn creepy smile it was. Booker found himself spreading his feet just a little, lowering his center of gravity, getting ready. Saw Joe doing the same out of the corner of his eye. The man was reaching into the case, fiddling with something.

“In the right hands, her work could do wonders for treating those suffering from dementia or trauma-related memory loss.” He pulled out of the case two large syringes filled with a pearly-blue liquid. An almost sickeningly pretty color. “Unfortunately for you, these are not the right hands.”

“Hey-!” Booker found himself yelling as both of their cell doors were opened and guards rushed in. He fought, but there were too many of them, and neither he nor Joe had been fed in over a day, close to two. But still he fought, earning nothing more than a cracked jaw and a body slam to the floor, held down by at least four of them. He couldn’t make out much past the guards, but it didn’t sound like Joe was doing any better.

He couldn’t see the man anymore, but he could hear him, his voice slithering through the sounds of fighting and harsh breaths. “We found just enough data on your DNA as well, Yusuf and Sebastian, in order to make these tailored specifically to you. Let’s see what happens when we target your own trauma-related memories, yes?”

“Hard… no…” Booker shoved and struggled, but he was pinned. He was trapped. And he was helpless to stop as a needle was inserted into his arm, that luminescent blue slowly seeping into his bloodstream. 

And then Booker was sinking into the floor. And then the floor was gone, and he was falling into nothingness, just black. The air thick and thin at the same time, though Booker actually wasn’t sure if he was breathing anymore. Or could if he wanted to.

And then he was still falling, but from a tree towards the snowy ground below. He was falling and then jerking to a stop not even a meter from the forest floor, his feet twitching and flailing as though they wanted to keep going, to touch. But Booker was held back by his neck, by the coarse rope around it. And he still wasn’t breathing. Anything that had been oxygen in his body replaced by horror, by pure fear, as he recognized these trees and this ground and those battered shoes on his feet.

This was Russia. 1812. And he was dying.

He choked and struggled, unable to bring his hands up to grab at the rope. Unable to breathe. He jerked again as his whole body tried to fight the inevitable, possibly snapping his own neck in the process. The shadows of men faded from the edges of his vision as they retreated from him, as they walked away. As they _left_ him. His fellow soldiers, his former comrades, walking away from him and leaving him to die alone. 

His own movements began to fade as well. No longer swinging from the tree branch, just a minute sway, a dance. Left to die alone for the first time.

Certainly not the last.

And then Booker was gasping back into his cell, still unable to move his hands, but propelling himself backwards until he hit stone wall. Stone. Not snow, not grass, not trees. He coughed harshly, hunched in on himself, blinking away the sting of tears. He could still feel the rope around his neck and the snow falling down around him. How was that possible?

The soldiers- guards, he reminded himself, he _was not back there_ \- were gone, probably had left as soon as the drug had gone in his arm. But the man, the scientist, was still there, watching him closely and yet dispassionately. Took off his glasses, gave them a cursory wipe against his shirt, put them back on. Still studying Booker.

He coughed again, tried to rub his shoulder against his neck if only to prove that there was no rope there. “Wh- what was that?” His voice was beyond hoarse. Painful, as though maybe he had been screaming aloud without realizing it.

“That,” the man smiled that awful smile again, “was what we call a successful first trial.”

There was a soft, wounded sound from the cell next to him. Joe. _Joe._ Booker shook off the dizziness and nausea that came with sudden movement, scrambling on his knees towards the bars separating them.

“It will be interesting to see how many deaths are triggered in one dose,” the man (sadist, psychopath, _dead man_ ) continued. “He’s older than you, yes? Centuries? I wonder how many he will end up reliving compared to you.”

“How many-?” Before Booker could finish his question, get his eyes on Joe, do anything, he was falling through the floor again, death waiting on the other side.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Nothing too graphic this chapter? Angst. Men talking about their feelings. Me trying to find that balance between 'Booker did a really shitty thing' and 'Booker is still a part of this crazy family.' Joe continuing to have a very bad day and make very bad jokes.

_For the first time in over a year, Nile isn’t drowning. She isn’t screaming. She isn’t banging her fists bloody against metal, feeling the sting of saltwater on her hands, feeling the mix of saltwater and tears on her face._

_The flashes come quick and sure. She’s walking down a near-empty street, stones cobbled into bricks lining her path. The buildings are dotted with small iron balconies decorated with flags, fabrics, bright flower boxes. A woman on one balcony is chatting with a neighbor._

_She takes a sudden turn down a set of stairs into an alley. Another set of stairs to a small door, like a freight or servants’ entrance. There’s a small plaque near it with the street number._

_She’s walking down a series of tunnels, stone hallways._

_She can hear screaming coming from the end of it._

_She knows that voice._

Nile shoved herself upward with a cry, hands involuntarily going to her head, to her ears, wanting to block out the sound.

“Nile?” someone, had to be Andy since Nicky wasn’t talking so much right now, called out.

She tried to steady her breaths. Her hands were another story; they wouldn’t stop shaking. “Oh, God…”

“Nile, what did you see?”

***

It killed him as much as anything had in the past few hours, but he still did it. “Please,” he forced the word out. “At least put me in the cell with him.”

The scientist tilted his head, pondering. Booker was up on his knees again, having gotten the dizziness under control once more. The nausea had faded after his third memory, replaced with a deeper and deeper exhaustion each time, like his muscles couldn’t keep up with the time travel his brain was putting them through. 

“You know, the handcuffs are probably helping you in the long run,” the man commented instead. “Keeping you from harming yourself while you’re under the influence.”

“Not what I asked,” he growled. “Let me into his cell. We can’t run, we can’t fight anymore.” He wasn’t _entirely_ sure that was true, but it was close enough that he wouldn’t risk it right now. Their metabolisms weren’t processing this drug fast enough. It was beating them. “Let me stay with him.” He blocked out the sound coming from Joe’s cell again. “What if he has a seizure, or-”

“I would request that you allow it to happen, for posterity’s sake of course.” And _fuck_ if Booker wasn’t going to kill this man with his bare hands. “But still, proximity could be an interesting factor. I wonder if you would begin having shared visions? Would you die at the same rate then, or will he continue to relive at this heightened speed?” He reached back and opened the outer door, gesturing a few of the guards in. Booker could have counted how many, but his headache- and his impatience- got in the way. 

He let the men pull him to his feet without a fuss, let them drag him out and over, shove him harder than necessary back to his knees inside the other cell. And he didn’t care. “Joe,” he called out softly, crawling forward as best he could. “Joe, can you hear me?”

They hadn’t had a single conversation since getting injected hours ago. Joe had woken out of it maybe twice, barely coherent either time, before getting dragged back into another bout. Three, four, five deaths at a time without pause. The amount of times he whispered out Nicky’s name, either they died together a lot or possibly Joe was witnessing some of Nicky’s deaths too. It was all about trauma after all, wasn’t it?

A twisted, bitter- but small and possibly shrinking- part of Booker thought this proved his point. Why go through all of that, why share it, when it just doubled your pain in the end? It doomed you to endless suffering. Not dead, but dead to the world. Didn’t it?

But Joe was nothing if not a contrarian to the world, or at least to Booker (the more likely option), because not long after Booker settled himself next to him, knee just touching against Joe’s shoulder, mere minutes after the guards and the scientist finally took their leave, his eyes cracked open.

“Joe?” he kept his voice low, his movements to a minimum. His status as history’s leading drunk meant he knew how to cater to a hangover. “Are you with me?”

“Mmm,” it was an affirmative, he could tell that much. He had no water to offer, or comfort either. But he held still and steady as Joe gave a broken-up groan and turned onto his side, resting his forehead against Booker’s knee. 

It was the first time any of the team had touched him in over a year. Jesus. He fought harder than ever to keep still. “You know where you are?”

Joe blinked slowly, a little steadier this time. He didn’t move from his curled up position, but did glance around. “I- I think maybe not… Oulu anymore.”

Booker blew out a breath, feeling at least a little bit of tension leave his shoulders. “Brussels, then.”

“No.” Joe coughed, turning his face away to hide the pain on it and failing spectacularly. “Helsinki.”

“You have a strange fascination with Finland today.” 

“It’s still today?” he asked, rolling slowly onto his back, eyeing the door and relaxing when he realized the scientist was gone.

Booker refused to mourn the loss of contact. “Five, maybe six hours since the, uh, injection.” He glared down at his arm, wishing his hands were free to rub at the spot. The mark was closing slowly too, an extra layer of mockery to this whole thing.

“Fuck,” Joe drew the word out, seeming to agree with him. “Did you- did it make you…?”

“Yes,” he moved to- well, to do nothing really, besides watch- as Joe dragged himself up to sit against the wall. He settled next to Joe, what he hoped was an appropriate amount of distance between them. “I haven’t had as many as you.”

“Well you’re just not trying hard enough,” Joe murmured, closing eyes and trying to breathe deeper, in through his nose, out through his mouth.

Booker stared at him, could _see_ him gathering his strength and readying himself to persevere through, like he always did. “Why would you-” he burst out, then stopped himself, but then- fuck it- “All of this, all you’ve suffered, how can you still want this?” _How can you still want to live?_

“Because I do,” Joe answered simply, eyes still closed. “Because I love my life.”

“You don't know how lucky you are,” he argued. “Your life isn’t about loss.”

“Is that what you think of me?” Joe asked. “Is that all you think I am? One part of two?”

“What?”

“Nicky and I have had each other, yes, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t had loss. It doesn’t mean we haven’t had grief. We have. But those are ours to own, no one else gets a say in erasing that.”

“Joe-”

“It also doesn’t- it doesn’t mean our bond is the only thing about us, that we aren’t-” it was too many words at one time, Joe wasn’t ready for it. He broke off to cough a few times, catch his breath. “I am something to Andy too. To the rest of you. I am something to myself. Something to the people and land I came from. To this world. I love him more than anything, but I am not just Nicky’s… half.” Another pause for breath. “And he is more than just mine.”

He stared. He couldn’t help it. He couldn’t speak either.

Joe continued on. “He deserved more than to be treated as such. To have his choices taken away because you couldn’t see past that.” Quieter, “I thought you’d seen us as more than that.”

“Shit, Joe, I…” he so wished his hands were free, he really needed to run them through his hair for a moment. “Shit. That’s what I did, huh?”

A small nod, followed by a wince at the movement. “That’s what you did.”

Joe left him then, pulled back under by the drug, twitching against the wall. Booker moved closer, using his shoulder to prop him up and keep him there. “I’m sorry,” he found himself saying. And then repeating it, over and over, a mantra. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

He counted two, maybe three deaths before Joe surfaced again, wheezing, curling in to protect his side (shot? stabbed?), which meant his face ended up pressed into Booker’s shoulder, breaths harsh against his shirt. “Goddammit,” he spoke through gritted teeth. “Damn that sadistic fucking- Fuck.”

“Easy,” he kept still, kept Joe upright. “Slow your breaths if you can.” He waited, gave Joe time to steady himself, before speaking. “I’m sorry Joe. I am. For everything.”

“I know,” Joe gasped. “I know you are. And you know you’ll be forgiven, right?”

He did- even with Joe, because the man who felt hurt the deepest also felt loyalty just as true. But maybe it wasn’t what he needed. “Should I be?” he grunted.

Joe stilled, forcing himself up to look Booker in the eyes. “Yes.”

And now Booker was the one looking away. “I’m not like you or the others, Joe. I’m not able to just… be good.”

“You’ve been around a painfully long time,” Joe pointed out. “But sometimes it takes a little longer to get past the pain. You are a good man, Book. That is not in question for any of us.”

“Then what are you questioning?” because there was something marring Joe’s face, his eyes.

Joe offered a pained smile. “My own faults, maybe.”

Not at all what he was expecting. “For what?”

“We- _I_ -” Joe corrected himself. “I didn’t realize you felt so bitter. I thought we were doing enough for you, and I’m sorry you’re still grieving. I hate that you felt aligning with Merrick was the better option. We failed you.”

“You didn’t-”

“We did though, in some way. That burden is on us,” Joe shook his head. “We all had to watch our loved ones from our first lives go on without us and die, but I never- I don’t think I appreciated how different it was for you. How cursed you felt. I never meant to make you feel like you weren’t worth our family for those same reasons. That your life was without that worth.”

He felt a rush of air leave him. He’d never heard it put that way before (or that well, _damn you Joe_ ). “I would never blame you for what goes on in my own head. But- but thank you.” 

“We’re trying to do better with Nile,” Joe said. “Make sure we don’t do the same to her. Include her, counsel her, give her… coping mechanisms?” A new phrase, one he had obviously been repeating often. “To help.”

“I think you did all that for me, too,” he smiled ruefully. “I just didn’t want to cope. Not until… well, now, really.”

Joe regarded him silently for a moment, the lines around his eyes easing away for the first time. “I think it’s time we let each other off the hook, hmm?”

He chuckled roughly, blinking hard even though he knew Joe would be able to see the tears anyway. “And as for ourselves?”

“That’s a little harder.”

“It’s a little harder,” he agreed. “But worth it.” They sat in silence for awhile, shoulder-to-shoulder, before Booker turned to him again. “So how are they?”

Joe’s smile was soft and sweet and the best thing he’d seen in two days. Maybe a year. “Andy, surprising absolutely no one, is soldiering on.”

“Jesus, I can only imagine.”

“Nile is teaching her self-defense.”

He almost choked on that. “What?”

Joe laughed. “To incorporate into her fighting, protect herself more. Compensate. So she can keep fighting the good fight.”

He shook his head. “No early retirement for the boss, eh?”

“I think that wall- you’ve seen it, Copley’s wall?” At Booker’s nod, “I think that lit a new fire in her. Nile’s done the rest. Andy is…” a slanted look at Booker, “she’s not grieving. I think she’s trying to live.”

He thought of Andy, his… his everything, in some ways. His platonic everything. Boss and inspiration and sister and… everything. “That’s good,” is all he can think to say. “And Nile?”

“She’ll be running the joint by the end of this century, I’d bet on it,” Joe said fondly. “Amazing.”

“And coping mechanisms?” he asked.

And could have sworn Joe turned bashful before his eyes. “She’s been re-reading books from her childhood and watching movies from then, I think it’s helping tether her to good memories, and that sense of right and wrong and heroes and such. Simple, where everything else is so complicated. Andy can’t sit through them and Nicky only tolerates it for her sake but,” a shrug, “I think I’m enjoying them.”

He laughed outright, shifting closer when Joe started coughing again. “Two hundred years, Joe, and you never stop surprising me.”

The outer door opened again. “Life is full of surprises, isn’t it?”

The voice was familiar. As was the panic that filled him all the way through.

“Look at that, I didn’t even have to bide my time out here waiting for a good entrance line. You've delivered for me once again, Booker.” 

Joe froze next to him, squinting, shaking his head as though he was hallucinating. “...Quynh?”

“Hello, Yusuf. Joe,” she smiled almost sweetly. “It’s so good to see you.”

Joe seemed at war with himself, half-smiling in hope and relief, half-scared at what he was seeing. He pressed his shoulder harder into Booker’s. “Am- am I…?”

“I would really like to get in touch with Andromache, Joe. I’m sure you can help me with that.”

Joe started to move forward, shifting like he wanted to reach out for her, like he was waiting for her to reach out for him. “Quynh? Th-the drug? Are you-”

“She’s real,” Booker muttered. “This isn’t a memory.”

Joe faltered again, so at a loss. “How do you know?”

“Oh, sweetheart. You haven’t figured it out yet?” She motioned with one hand, and the guards were back, readying to enter the cell. “Booker and I have been working together for almost a year.”

No. _No_.

“No,” Joe echoed his panic. “He-”

“He’s been helping me all along. Why do you think he was never taken out for questioning? Or why he recovered so much quicker from his injection? Come on, Joe, you’ve always been trusting, but this is sad.”

Joe turned to Booker, eyes wide, disbelieving. Disbelieving of what, Booker had no idea. “Book?”

“It’s a lie, she’s lying, I’m not working for her,” he all but begged.

“Just look at those eyes,” Quynh tsked, stepping aside so the guards could enter. “Just as I told Booker you’d react. Always the puppy, never the wolf, Yusuf. Always so easy to fool.” 

“Stop-” Booker growled, would have fought if he could. But the guards had both of them separated and pinned, and he couldn’t stop Quynh from talking, poisoning with each word.

“The problem,” she knelt down next to Joe, cupped his face almost lovingly. “Is that you never learned, unlike the rest of us, how to guard yourself. You leave yourself so open and,” she patted his face before standing up again, “vulnerable.”

“This isn’t you,” Joe fought for breath as he struggled. “Not the Quynh I love. Please, you're my- we're-”

“She’s still at the bottom of the ocean where you left her,” Quynh snarled. Then smiled, calm once more. “You were dreaming of happy reunions? Really, Joe. Even Nicolò knows how to protect his own heart better than this. It’s why Booker and I knew to go for you first. You’re the easiest target.”

“No!” Booker tried to reach for him, them, either of them, again, and was again held back.

Quynh snapped her fingers, “Bring him. We’ll see if all these memories haven’t helped him remember Andromache’s phone number.”

“Joe, she’s lying, I swear,” Booker surged forward again, needing Joe to hear him. “Don’t listen to her, please-!”

But Joe was gone. Quynh was gone. Everyone was gone, and Booker was- once again- alone. 

***

_They’re running out of air. Quickly._

_“Two men walk into a bar…”_

_And yet not quickly enough._

_“Not now, Joe,” he growls, feeling at the rocks around his head and shoulders again. Maybe he missed something, some break, some weakness. Joe swears that Andy and Nicky are probably a few feet above them, already digging them out, but Booker can’t hear them. And they need to get out before they run out of air in this pocket they managed to find as the cave-in started._

_“Last one, I promise. Two men walk into-”_

_“Conserve your air.” Or before he strangles Joe._

_“I’m not even dizzy yet. Are you dizzy?” Joe is leaned back against the other side of their small space. A large slab of rock is draped like a blanket over his lap, but Booker knows it’s crushing one if not both knees into shards._

_“You seem pretty light in the head to me,” Booker sighs as he gives up. Again. They’re both lying. They don’t have much time left, and both of them know it. Booker is stalling as much as he can, he’d rather not die of suffocation a few times before Andy and Nick get to them._

_“Two men walk into a bar. The third man ducks.”_

_“Lord, please kill one of us soon, I don’t care which one,” he casts his eyes up to the heavens._

_“Save your air, Booker.”_

_“Shut up, Joe.”_

_The rocks around them shift with an ominous rumble, filling their little haven with dust and dirt. They both start coughing, and find they can’t stop. “I don’t-” Joe wheezes, curls inward a little then yelps when it pulls on his legs. “Fuck.”_

_“You don’t what?” Booker should be silent, he knows it. But he also knows it feels a little less dark in here when Joe is talking to him._

_Joe’s hands flail a little bit before one lands on the rock slab, the other on Booker’s foot. “I don’t think they’re going to find us in time.”_

_He tries to ignore the growing ache in his chest, dizziness fully settling in. His body weighing itself down. Becoming part of the rocks. “Not… a fun way to die.”_

_The hand gripping his foot starts to go slack. “Better than being alo-.”_

Booker came awake suddenly. “God damn drug,” he coughed out, sucking in air. He was still in Joe’s cell. It could only have been what- an hour, maybe two?- since Quynh had taken Joe away. Long enough that he was actually grateful when two guards entered and unlocked his cell. “What more could you all possibly want?”

They yanked him to his feet. “Boss needs you,” one grunted. He was French. And Booker had to believe Quynh had sent that one on purpose, just to fuck with him. “Seems your friend isn’t doing so well on his second dose, doc wants you to talk him out of it if you-”

Booker never would be able to explain later if he’d attacked then out of strategic positioning or just because he was that pissed off. But they’d only sent two guards, and Booker had had enough. He shouldered the Frenchman into the wall, knocking his head into the lamp with a sharp crack, shattering the lamp and hopefully a skull. He let the other one tackle him, using their momentum to roll until he could get his legs out from under him, wrapping them around the man’s neck.

Ignoring the stab wounds to his thigh, three and counting, he yanked and twisted at the same time, snapping his neck with practiced ease. He lay there for moment, his strength was definitely returning but not quite as quickly as normal, then sat up, turned, and searched their pockets as best he could. He found the keys, unlocked his cuffs, and took up both assault rifles in about a minute. Not bad at all. Maybe he wasn’t as out of shape as he’d thought.

He cuffed the two men together and dumped them in a cell, and was just centering himself to come up with an extraction plan when a figure appeared in the doorway, half-shrouded by the newly darkened room.

Not that that really mattered, as he’d know Joe’s silhouette anywhere. “Shit, how did you-” and then he moved forward as Joe stumbled, holding on tight to the doorframe. “Joe?”

His hands, holding onto a Glock for dear life, were shaking. His shirt was in tatters now, eyes wild and glassy, and blood was still dripping from his forearm. A second dose, the guard had said. Shit. “Book, I- I think I'd like to go now.”


	3. Chapter 3

_“Book, I- I think I’d like to go now.”_

Booker double checked his rifles, slinging one around his back and sighting the other. “Where’s Quynh?”

Joe started to shake his head, then stopped with a groan. “Gone. Or not here. I don’t know. She wasn’t there. In the room. I killed them.”

“In the room?” He moved closer, tentatively. If Joe wasn’t all there, and thought Booker was working with Quynh… “The scientist?”

A noise deep in the back of his throat, almost a growl. Wounded and cornered. “Dead. And two guards.”

“That leaves us, what, at least twelve. Probably more.” They couldn’t be sure there weren’t more in reserve. The guards had rotated shifts a few times. “You, uh, came back for me?” Or to shoot him, maybe.

“I- I don’t-" Joe was leaning more heavily against the door now. “Didn’t believe her.” His eyes started to close, and Booker darted forward to grab him before he collapsed. “Or if I’m wrong again, you’re my hostage.” He patted at Booker’s shoulder to make his point.

“You’re holding me hostage?” he smiled softly as he draped one of Joe’s arms across his shoulders and held onto his waist with his right, keeping his left hand free to shoot. 

“Until you see the error of your ways,” Joe switched his gun to his right, knowing he could probably only provide cover at best right now. “Need more adult supervision… in your life.”

“Okay, Joe.” He ducked his head out into the hall, saw it was clear, and pulled Joe out after him. “You find me an adult, I’ll let myself be supervised.”

He muttered something that sounded like “ungrateful child” in Arabic, stumbling for a step or two before he found his footing alongside Booker. “If I… go under again, you’ll have to drop me.”

Booker had unfortunately been thinking about the same thing. “I’ll set you down if I have to, but I’m not leaving you behind.”

“Better not, asshole,” he grumbled. “Fuckin’… tell Andy on you.”

Drugs aside, this was something Booker was used to and could almost take comfort in. Joe always got grumpy when he hit that level of bone-deep tired. They used to tease him that he’d only speak in eyebrow movement after a certain number of hours awake. His very own Morse code. He would have laughed now, made a little call-back joke to it, if it weren’t for the team of four guards that rounded the corner ahead of them. He took out three, leaving Joe to take out the fourth, and then they were moving again. Another turn, another hall.

“You knew Quynh was out of the water,” Joe said suddenly. It would have knocked Booker back if he hadn’t already been sliding into mission-mode.

“She showed up in Paris about six months ago. She’d already been out for years at that point, I think. Found a way to-” a pause, sneaking a look around another corner. Three men loitering by a door. “To project what she wanted me to see in my dreams. I never saw it coming. I’m guessing Nile has no idea either.”

“Why did she come to you?” Joe nodded at the three fingers he held up, re-gripping his gun. 

“She wanted to know where the rest of you were, why I wasn’t with you.” They whipped around the corner together, three quick shots, three men down. “She offered me a job in her ‘enterprise’- no details on what that was- and left when I turned her down. Could probably tell I was piss drunk at the time.”

“You? No.”

Booker ignored him. “I’ve seen her maybe twice since then. Never anything threatening. I wanted to call Andy, but I didn’t know if Quynh wanted to be found.” He could understand that, at least. “Wasn’t sure if Quynh had already revealed herself to you all already. Or if any of you’d believe me if she hadn’t. Last time I saw her was a month ago. She didn’t argue when I turned down the job again, just said she’d see me again soon. She was playing with me that whole time.”

“Well,” Joe was gasping with the effort to get to the downed guards, strip them of ammo. “I guess this was seeing you again.”

“Can’t say I’m a fan,” he grunted as he strapped a sawed-off to his thigh. And regretted it for a moment when Joe tensed next to him, until he realized it wasn’t because of his words. The door the three guards had been standing by led to another room, smaller than their cells had been. A table with medical-grade straps, three of them torn, in the center, and blood spatters everywhere.

Joe’s interrogation room.

“C’mon, Joe,” he tugged him along, past the room, blocking his view of it.

Joe allowed himself to be pulled. “If they’ve already cleared the bodies, they know we’re out. They’re looking for us.”

He nodded, taking one of the assault rifles off his chest and slinging it around Joe’s neck like a life preserver, then readjusted his grip on him as they moved. “I know you don’t believe her about me, but I hope you don’t believe her about you either,” he surprised himself by saying. “I envied you, so many times, that you can still feel everything so much.” He paused when he felt Joe stumble again, giving him a moment to breathe. “It’s a strength, you know. Not a weakness.” Something it was taking him two hundred and some years to learn.

Joe huffed out a laugh, a slightly hollow one. “You wouldn’t be such a drunk if you weren’t trying to escape how much you feel things too, idiot.” And then he was out, his strings cut as the drug reared its godawful head again.

“Shit,” he dragged Joe back a few meters to a small indent in the tunnel, setting him down against stone while he took up point at the corner next to him. And waited.

A few agonizing minutes and Joe was back with him, arms coming up around his head as though for protection, face buried in his upright knees, a stream of curses in at least three languages popping out. Booker reached out and grasped the back of his neck briefly, squeezed, then hauled him back up to his feet again.

“It’d be easier for me right now if you didn’t feel so much, of course,” he tried to continue their conversation like nothing had happened, nothing was wrong.

Joe reached to him this time for help, hooking his arm around Booker’s shoulders. “I think I got it from my mother.” 

“Yeah?” Another quick corner check, and they were off again. Another goddamn stone hallway.

“I think. Can’t really… remember her anymore. I remember I love her, but her face, her voice… So much that’s happened I can’t-” he swallowed hard. “Scares me how much I don’t remember anymore.”

Booker nodded, tried to keep his face stoic and his mind on the matter at hand. “Might be why this drug is hitting you so hard. A lot is being brought back.”

“Copley has that wall, all those good things we’ve done, so many pictures of us,” Joe was rambling now, but he was staying conscious and relatively quiet, so Booker let him. “Some of them I just can’t _remember_. Is that awful of me?”

“You’ve been around a painfully long time,” he echoed Joe’s words from before. “It’s okay. You’re okay.” And some things are okay to forget, though he didn’t mention that now.

“I have to- to feel what I can. So I know I’m real. Can’t disappear like memories do. Like regular people do.” His gun arm started to droop, but he brought it right back up when Booker tapped on his elbow. “I don’t want Nicky to ever forget how much I love him.”

“I think Andy retiring is more likely than that happening, Joe,” he squeezed his hand as comfortingly as he could around Joe’s waist. “I think the world will burn itself out before you two do.”

Joe smiled, but it was starting to fade just like the rest of him. “’M tired, Book.”

“I know, brother.” And he knew Joe didn’t just mean right now, didn’t just mean in body.

“Quynh was right that the rest of you are better at… that. I wish sometimes I could be. I’m sure I- I can be… tiresome for you all. But not if- if it hurts so much, you and Andy, for you to just exist. I want to do more than exist. ’M sorry.”

“Now who’s being the idiot,” he tried to make his voice sound sharp, but it was too sharp and cracked coming out of his throat. “All those deaths I just had to relive, you know what I realized?” He could hear faint, very faint, footsteps ahead of them. Hopefully the last of the guards, he wasn’t sure how much either of them had left in them. “The deaths that were easiest to get through were when I was with the rest of you. I don’t think I ever realized how much you all tried to make sure no one died alone. How much you cared.”

He felt a hand come up and sluggishly pat his face. “My beautiful boy. All grown up.”

“Idiot,” he said again. “You know what, just keep hold of me, and give me your gun. We’re not dying anymore in fucking Belgrave or wherever.” 

“Belfast.”

The footsteps were getting closer. “Or Bucharest?”

The smallest of hesitations, but enough for Booker to know Joe was losing the battle against gravity and maybe consciousness too. “Budapest.”

“Very good.” And with that, he turned and started firing. They hit the next corner with no issues aside from a bullet or two to the extremities. Joe was able to provide ammo reloads and call out locations so Booker could take each man down, but they both grimaced at the sound of more boots ahead. These tunnels might have been never-ending, but their patience and upper body strength weren’t.

Booker laid in wait this time, keeping Joe behind him as much as he could, conserving their energy. Waited until the point man was just turning the corner to them, and shoved the Glock in his face, just as the man did the same to him.

And both of them froze.

There was the briefest of moments, where Nicky’s hand tightened on the trigger, where Booker pulled Joe just a little bit more behind his own body, but only so brief. And then Nicky was shoving his gun in its holster and Booker was damn-near throwing Joe into his arms. “Joe,” Nicky sighed the name, gathering him close. “Joe, Joe, I’m here.” He buried his face in Joe’s hair as arms shakily came up to wrap around him in turn, switching to Italian. “I’m here. I have you.”

And then Booker was pulled into an embrace as well, two other sets of arms. “We didn’t know.”

He shook his head, gripping Andy’s back tightly with the slight possibility he might never let her go again. “Day after Joe. No way you could’ve.”

Nile pulled back first, eyeing him. “You’re okay?” She obviously hadn’t _grown_ in his time away, and yet she had. He could see the strength, the steadiness in her shoulders. The light and readiness in her eyes. Joe was right. She was going to run things some day.

He nodded. “I am.” He turned to Andy again, drank her in to give Nicky and Joe a few more moments of peace. She had changed too. There were a few extra lines to her face, a new way she- right, she’d been learning new fight techniques. More defensive stances. She held herself differently in her mortality. But she was still Andy, she was still perfect, and she seemed to be adapting well, just like Joe had said.

Nicky and Joe joined them, and somehow by unspoken agreement they managed to switch reunions, Nile and Andy drawing Joe into another hug, allowing him to lean into them. “You’re very very late,” he mumbled into Nile’s shoulder. “This will not… look good in the peer review, mini-Boss.”

“Listen, Stitch, I had to bust like eighteen different heads to get to you. You can shut right up, okay?” she fired back, a strained but happy grin on her face, while Andy brushed a hand through his hair, turning his face slightly this way and that to make sure all his wounds were closed up.

“You are okay?” Nicky asked softly from next to him. Booker held an arm out in reply, and the two of them half-hugged, still facing the other three. There was no way he’d step between Nicky’s line of sight to Joe for at least another three weeks.

If he was still around in three weeks.

“How bad is it?” Nicky’s voice was still quiet.

“There’s a drug they made. She gave us-” he snapped back to attention quickly. “Fuck. Andy, it’s- it’s Quynh. She’s alive. Here. She’s behind this.”

“We know,” Andy spoke too calmly, too measured. She pulled back from Joe so Nicky could grab him up again. “We know.” 

“I dreamt of this place last night,” Nile added, squeezing Joe’s arm one more time before letting go as well.

“We need to evac,” Nicky was gentle but quick to cut in, checking his clip was full, lifting Joe’s arm around his shoulders, even while pressing one more kiss to his temple. “Andy, we can’t-”

“Yeah,” she glanced around, scanning back and forth a few times. Expecting Quynh, Booker realized. Expecting her to appear, for better or worse. She cleared her throat. “Yeah. Getting you guys out is more important.”

Booker ached at the conflict in her face and voice, the thousand other things. He set up point behind her as Nile positioned in front, all three following Nicky and Joe. Tried not to wince as a hatch in the wall, barely noticeable, was opened and bright sunlight filtered in.

“Madrid!” Joe called back to them faintly, incongruously delighted. “Neither of us guessed Madrid, Book. We both lose. No Cabernet for the... the winner, unless-”

“Shut up, Joe,” one of them, or most likely all of them, said as they passed through into fresh air.

***

The fact that Booker hadn’t expected this was plenty pathetic. Of course Quynh had allowed Nile to finally see real locations in her dream. Of course she’d disappeared after Joe was dosed a second time, allowing only the guards to be left for the team to find.

Of course she was waiting for them at their safehouse when they got there. Just like she’d done to him in Paris.

He heard Nicky’s curse the second he and Joe made it through the door, and there was an almost comical rush between him, Andy, and Nile to be the next inside. Quynh was sitting at the dining room table, a gun in front of her like a place setting.

Booker immediately moved to cover Andy, the shock of seeing Quynh, no matter how much she’d prepared for it, leaving her momentarily frozen. He was relieved to see Nile track his position and move to help Nicky cover Joe. Nicky, also in shock but just as quickly moving into anger. Joe, leaning in closer to Nicky, unable to even look at her.

And Quynh, who just laughed. “There’s no need for that, friends. I’m just here for a quick chat. I think we can agree the time for any dramatics is over, right?”

Her voice snapped Andy back into her body, waving Nicky behind her without turning. “Get Joe to the back.”

And of course Joe wasn’t having any of it. “What? No, I’m n-not letti-” but the only real thing in control right now was that drug, and Joe was out again.

“Shit,” Booker took a gamble and holstered his gun. “Nile,” he nodded to Andy, switching places with her so he could help Nicky with Joe. “Come on, we need to get him down somewhere.”

“Joe?” Nicky switched his gun to his other hand, grabbing at Joe’s face, checking his pulse. “Booker, what-?”

“It’s the drug,” he refused to look Quynh’s way, instead guiding the two towards the back room, hopefully one with a bed. “He’ll be out for a few minutes.”

More cursing, more than Booker had thought Nicky was actually capable of. They set Joe down, and Booker moved to the attached bathroom to get some water. Nicky perched on the bed, one hand on Joe’s heart keeping time, the other on his face. Muttered a thanks when Booker put the cup of water down next to them, then nodded at the rest of the room. “Pack anything in here you can find. We’ll have to relocate after this.”

“Any safehouse she knows about is compromised,” Booker added needlessly, of course Nicky knew that. He gathered the two beloved swords first, leaning them next to the bed.

“What is this,” Nicky asked, jaw clenching almost audibly as Joe winced and shuddered, but didn’t wake up.

“They raided Merrick’s lab after Copley had it wiped, found something we missed,” Booker threw clothes, it didn’t matter whose, into a bag. “Some research they’d done. The memory centers of our brains.”

“He’s reliving something?” Nicky guessed.

“Death,” he turned to the closet. 

“Which one?”

“All of them.” Booker kept his back turned as he answered, giving Nicky privacy to react to that. “He got an extra dose. I don’t know how long he’ll be-”

There was sudden shouting back in the main room, Andy and Nile both. Booker was up and gun out without a thought, Nicky a step behind him. 

There was something like an old-fashioned standoff happening in the living room, Quynh backing away to the front door, all three women with guns drawn. She was the first to notice their reappearance, and that sweet smile showed again. If Booker hadn’t known any better, he would’ve sworn there was genuine concern in her eyes. “How’s Joe?” 

It was only by luck that he managed to snag the back of Nicky’s shirt and hold him in place and keep his gun up at the same time. Nicky probably would’ve shoved him off and made a run at her anyway if Joe hadn’t reloaded an assault rifle behind them, propping himself up in the doorway. There was a familiar ‘what am I going to do with you?’ shade to Nicky’s expression as he pulled back, aligning his shoulder with Joe’s.

“Alright then,” Quynh reached the door. “I guess we’ll continue this another time, when we’re all back to real fighting strength, hmm?” She saluted her gun at Nile. “Sweet dreams from now on, babyface. Sorry for taking up so many of them.” And then she was gone.

Booker waited a few seconds. Then, “So what the fuck was that?”

Andy turned, tucking her gun away. Drawing herself up, her face as clear and calm (and wrong) as it had been back in the stone hallways, she studied each of them. “Pack your shit,” was all she said. “Moving out in ten.”

***

They made it out of Spain quick enough, into France, then on to just south of Frankfurt before stopping. Nile had been on the phone with Copley almost immediately, setting up a new safehouse for them, as secret and secure as they’d had to use in decades. Longer, probably.

A small little house outside a small little town, Booker wasn’t sure if it was fate or foresight that there was only one bedroom, four large beds all within view of each other. What they needed right now.

They let Nicky claim the bed in the far corner, sheltered by two windowless walls for cover. They waited as he eased Joe down onto it and sat beside him before the rest of them dropped their bags and did the same to their own beds. Booker watched as Joe tugged plaintively, persistently on the hem of Nicky’s shirt until he smiled a little and sat back, allowing Joe to lay his head on his lap.

He looked up to see Andy watching him watch them, a thousand and one thoughts in her mind. “What happened?” he asked again, having held off for the entire trip.

Andy just shook her head. “I don’t know.” He glanced at Nile, but she shrugged, just as lost. “It’s like she spoke in riddles, I have no… She’ll be back,” Andy continued. “I just… don’t know when and don’t know why. Or how or… or anything.” An almost laugh, exhausted. “It feels like we got dropped into the middle of a chess game without getting a look at the board. We’re going to have to prepare for just about everything.”

There was a beat of silence, then a voice spoke up from the bed in the far corner. “I’m not sure I’m comfortable with that metaphor. It means I was just a pawn, and that’s not good for my self-esteem.”

“You’ll recover,” Nicky rolled his eyes, tightened his grip on Joe briefly. “Go back to sleep.” He’d had two more drops on the road, scaring the shit out of Nicky each time. Now he just looked up from Nicky’s lap to grin at him tiredly, relaxing as Nicky brushed his fingers over and down his eyes, forcing them closed. “Sleep, love.”

Booker watched, a new weight behind everything they did as he remembered Joe’s words back in the cell. He looked away, cleared his throat, and stood. “I’ll take first watch,” he offered, moving to the door. They’d agreed on shifts for the first few nights anyway, in case Quynh had stayed on their trail.

He nodded to himself, gathered up two of the guns, and settled into a chair just outside the front door to look out at the garden and deserted lane that brought them here. It was almost eerie now, the silence and stillness. The solitude.

And he should have known it wouldn’t last that long, not with this group. The door opened again a few minutes later, Andy coming out with her own chair, a blanket wrapped around her shoulders. He waited until she was sitting next to him, then found a smile for her. “No flask?”

There was no heat to the glare, only fondness, and he found himself that much more relieved. “You’re on watch, and I’m on a mortal liver.” He chuckled and offered her one of his guns instead. She smiled. “Much better.”

“So what’s next?” he asked after she’d unloaded and reloaded the clip, maybe checking that he’d actually put bullets in- No. No. He wasn’t going to allow himself down that path. He wasn’t going to let his own self-recrimination get in the way of more important things.

“We’ll talk to Copley some more,” she sat back. “Get those tunnels wiped out so whatever data and shit they have is gone. _That_ ,” she hooked a thumb back in the direction of the bedroom, “is never going to happen to us again. We’ll have him start tracking Quynh, too. Figure out how he hadn’t already gotten word she was around. She has to have somebody basically doing the same for her, and we need to find out who.”

“And why,” he added.

Andy nodded. “And why. I wanted… even when we were talking to her back there, I wanted to believe she was messed up but still her somewhere deep down. We’d make it work. But what she did to you and Joe…” she pulled the blanket tighter around herself, knuckles white. “We have to treat her as dangerous. Which is completely my fault.”

“Andy-”

“No, it is, it is,” she was matter of fact, resigned. “I didn’t save her. I broke a promise I made. I _stopped looking_. And now she’s… you can’t tell me this wasn’t about revenge.” 

“By no fault of yours,” he insisted. “She made the decision to go after me and Joe. And those men who put her in the coffin were at fault for her being there to begin with. Not you.”

“And from her point of view, we gave up on her. We never saved her. So, to her at least? My fault. And she’ll be coming at us again from some other angle we’re not seeing yet. For the time being we fortify, lay low.”

He mirrored her nod. He had a hundred things he wanted to say, a thousand, but he didn’t know which ones she would want to hear. “I’m glad to see you again,” he settled on. It had been one of the hardest parts of his exile, that he was losing Andy’s last years, the opportunity to spend them with her.

She smiled, eyes shining a little in the moonlight. “Me too. I’m glad you and Joe are on good terms, I thought it would have been at least another eight years before one of you caved.”

“Oh yeah?”

“I guess you two aren’t nearly as stubborn as I thought you were.”

He groaned. “Sure, out of all of us, Joe and I are the stubborn ones. Okay.”

“Excuse me?” her eyes widened, half-real, half-playful.

“What about the Italian who went on a hunger strike after we went to McDonald’s for the first time in the '70s. Or the woman who still refuses to to admit that she was the muse for that movie about the-”

“Okay, okay, no need for that.” She smacked his shoulder. And left her hand there as they lapsed into another, comfortable silence. “You seem better,” she said then.

“I am, a little. A recent change.” That was all he’d say for now. What had happened in that cell, what he and Joe had talked about, that would remain theirs for awhile longer. “You too?”

“Yeah, same, I guess.” She gestured back into the house. “Those three… they’re right, you know. About life. What we do. It’s better this way.”

“I’m getting that, yes.” He ran a hand through his hair, pushing it back. “There’s some things I didn’t know I had until now. Or, uh, until I didn’t have it again. I just needed a good lecture or two to remind me.” Sure, there had been torture, and there was still a shit ton of issues to work through, but Booker would disregard that for now. Steps in the right direction.

“Tell me about it,” she rolled her eyes good-naturedly. “Nile is not subtle.”

“No?”

“Some cartoon movie she made us watch like three times about a little girl and an alien and how important it is for family to be together, dear God.” 

He thought back on certain things he’d heard about coping mechanisms. “I bet Joe liked it though.” Her snort of laughter was confirmation enough.

Andy’s grip on his shoulder tightened, jostling him gently. “You know it’s going to be up to the whole group, but if it were up to me… things are different now. Because of Quynh. I want you back.”

“You do?”

She smirked. “This shitty game is a lot shittier without you. And the whole family in one place… nothing stronger than that.” She shrugged then, maybe not noticing (of course she did) the emotion on his face. “But it’s up to you too. There’s still going to be amends for you to make. But, if you want to come back, if you’re ready...”

Booker didn’t know how to answer. Didn’t know what to answer _with_. And was saved from trying by a sudden sound of distress and two startled voices inside. They rushed back in, Booker half-expecting Quynh and an army to be there, only to find Joe lost in the throes of another memory. He’d been pulled up to sit against Nicky’s chest, breathing hard, gasping, then not breathing at all. Dying. Nicky looked less terrified this time and more determined instead, trying to hold him still, speaking lowly but rushed in Italian. Nile had climbed up onto the bed next to him, her hands on Joe’s face and neck.

“Fucking hell,” Andy moved over to the bed, stowing the gun. “How many more times is he going to have to go through this?”

“I don’t know,” Booker answered grimly. He stood back, reluctant to join, unsure, until Joe shuddered again, hands flailing out. “Ah shit,” he was quick then, recognizing the movement for what it was. “Joe,” he sat on the bed by their feet, capturing one of his hands. “You’re okay. You have air, it’s okay.”

“What’s he seeing?” Nile demanded.

“Cuba. 1958.”

“The cave-in,” Andy realized. “You two got buried.” Her hands went to Joe’s knee, the one that had in fact been crushed by the rock slab. It had taken a good thirty minutes to fully heal when they’d finally been pulled out. Those slow wounds were sometimes harder to forget.

“You have air, you’re okay,” Booker kept talking. “It’s not real. It’s the drug, you know this. You know it’ll pass soon.” 

Nicky lowered his voice to a soothing whisper, with both hands on Joe’s chest as though he’d push air in manually if he had to. Joe’s free hand had landed on Nicky’s thigh, scrambling for purchase, for balance, for _help_.

“It’s the drug, it’s not real,” Booker squeezed his hand as Joe hiccupped a breath, finally managing to take in some air, rattling his lungs. “Madrid, remember? Not Brussels and Finland.” He didn’t care about the ‘what the fuck’ look on Nile’s face, just that some life finally seemed to be coming back to Joe’s. “You were singing when I woke up. We got out, we’re safe. You’re safe. Just breathe.”

That may have well been the most words he’d said at one time in over a year. And he didn’t care, because Joe’s eyes fluttered open, trying to take them all in, then closed again. A few tears slipped out as he struggled to get more oxygen, Nicky reaching up to wipe them away with his thumb. “Yusuf?” he said softly.

Another gasp. An almost-half-normal breath in. “Two…”

“Two what?”

“Two men walk into a bar…” he leaned back against Nicky, tried to smile as Nicky rested their heads together.

Booker laughed, not caring how jagged it sounded. “The third man ducks.”

“Oh fucking hell,” Andy groaned the words this time, dropping her head down against their legs. “I hate all of you.” 

They all began to sink down with relief, staying on or by the bed. Booker watched as Joe used his free hand to clasp one of Nicky’s, bringing it to his mouth for a quick kiss as though apologizing for the fuss. “Why did you pick an Irish song?” he found himself asking. At Joe’s confused look, “When I woke up in the cell, you were singing an Irish folk song. Why?”

Nicky looked confused now too. “Irish?”

Joe shook his head, hummed a few bars. And then Nicky gave a short laugh, fond and exasperated in equal measure. “I think he was singing the Scottish version.”

He frowned. “What’s the difference?” 

Nicky kept his eyes on Joe as he sang, as Joe tried to catch his breath long enough to hum along, “ _A man can drink and nae be drunk, a man can fight and nae be slain, a man can court a raven lass_ -” with that Nicky tugged on one of Joe’s dark curls, just to get him to smile some more, “- _and perhaps be welcomed home again_.”

For a second Booker thought he must still be on the drug too, because it felt like the floor had slid out from under him. But no, he was still sitting there, on a bed, in a house. With his two insatiably, graciously loving brothers in front of him and his steely, shining little sister grabbing her pillow and satin hair wrap from her own bed and then settling back down with them.

And his other sister, his first one, a miracle, a hero, a goddess, was standing up with a wince at the pop in her newly mortal spine, and managing to wipe at her own eyes without everyone seeing. “My turn on watch.”

“I should-” Booker stopped at the shake of her head, at the way her eyes looked pointedly down at something. He followed the gaze; Joe’s hand was still in his. He didn’t drop it, but it was a near thing. He managed to squeeze carefully instead, let go.

“You,” Andy pronounced. “Stay.”

And if there was more weight to that than just the current moment, nobody said a thing.

Nile was getting comfortable at Nicky’s side, unfurling a blanket to cover the lot of them. Nicky helped her smooth it down around them, still sitting up against the headboard, and held her pillow while she got her hair up and covered. Joe was still sprawled against his chest, eyes closed, humming a different song just barely loud enough to hear, something from his homeland. And then a sigh as Nicky admonished him to sleep, a wince as he tried to stretch sore muscles. And then Joe’s foot came out of the blanket to rest on Booker’s leg. Not quite like Andy’s words, but a pronouncement all the same.

And so, he stayed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Epilogue to come! Thanks for sticking with me this far :)


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was just supposed to be a couple hundred words of Joe/Nicky fluff to wrap things up but Nicky has SO. MANY. FEELINGS. And since about half of them are about how wonderful Joe is, I had to write 'em out.

He liked to think of himself as a fairly even-tempered person. He had his moments where things boiled over, sure, but as the years stretched on those instances were fewer and farther between. He was a grounding force for the team, he was the bedrock, and he took no small measure of comfort in being so steady. 

All of this was to say, Nicky wasn’t sure he’d ever felt a rage like this before.

It had built up without him realizing. There had been just relief at first, finding them in Madrid. Relief, shock, concern. He’d even hugged Booker, something he had decided not to even contemplate doing for at least another twenty-six years. But now, outside the immediate aftermath, there was little else in him that could drown out the rage.

So he sat very still, breathed in and out slowly, trying to time it to the ticking of the clock he could hear in the kitchen. It was only the regular tempo of that clock, and the precious man asleep in his arms, that kept him from going into the kitchen and breaking every piece of crockery with his bare hands. (He didn’t care about waking the others. They would understand. Andy would probably declare it one of those healthy coping mechanisms and join in.)

He wanted to go outside and scream into the night sky and listen to it echo. He wanted to take his sword and run it through a hundred men. He wanted to kill the man who had made that drug, had injected Joe and Booker and watched them suffer. He wanted… he wanted to drop everything and go to Quynh. He wanted to grab her by the shoulders, shake her, beg her for an explanation. How she could do this to them.

(But he knew, oh he knew how she could. He knew what had driven her to this.)

When Andy and Quynh had found them all those centuries ago, it had been Quynh who had taken charge of easing them into the team. More than a team. She had been the one to guide them, answer their questions when she could, bolster them when she couldn’t. She had sat up with Nicky so many nights just to watch the stars. She had saved every scrap of art Joe drew for her.

And in the last two days, she had destroyed so much. Nearly everything.

He looked down at Joe again, watching him sleep. Watching him breathe. He’d had just one more brief drop from the drug after they’d all piled on the bed (shaking, _whimpering_ soft in the back of his throat, flinching at any touch to his face) but had been quiet since. Nicky found himself praying that it was over, that he could finally get some rest. That they all could for a little while. 

He glanced over to Andy’s bed at that. She was sleeping too, thank God, however tense and haunted it may be. A mortal body had meant a mortal psyche apparently, and her dreams over the last year had not been fun for her. He could only imagine what she’d be seeing now. 

Booker was also sleeping, still sitting perpendicular at their feet on the bed, back against the wall. He seemed a little lighter, less worn down, and Nicky was pretty sure Joe had something to do with that, though he didn’t know the details. He also didn’t know how he himself felt about this reunion just yet. One hundred years was a long time, yes, but just one? After… after all that? He wasn’t sure if that was penance enough either. 

What he did know was that lately the greatest threats to their family seemed to come from the inside, and that really pissed him off. 

They often joked that Joe got angry enough for the both of them, but Nicky also knew what an actual blessing it was- Joe felt (and showed) his anger and despair deeply but managed to counter it with so much love for things as well. He could go to those extremes because he knew how to balance them- how to _live_ with them- and Nicky could always pull him back to something steady if he needed to. Just as Nicky always had Joe to remind him that he was more than just the battles he fought. That he was loved for who he was off the battlefield, not because of any victories on it.

Joe was the high-flying bird, Nicky was the tree with deep roots.

But tonight his limbs felt cut off. Chopped away. By Quynh. _Quynh_. By Booker. By Andy’s fate and all the deaths Joe was dying a second time without him and-

“You alright?” Booker’s voice was soft, hoarse. He hadn’t moved at all, but he was awake, watching him. He was lighter, yes, but there were still dark shadows under his eyes. The last few days hadn’t been kind to any of them. And yet...

_He and Nile were the ones to find the scene. They hadn’t even been concerned at that point, strolling along the route to the market, placing bets on what shiny thing or person or dog or sunset must have distracted Joe on his errands. Even laughing about it as they passed a random alley. But Nicky spotted them. There they were- two discarded grocery bags, the reusable ones Nile had bought just the day before. One on its side, spilling mangoes onto the cobblestones. The other still sitting upright, somehow more disturbing in its neatness. The splash of blood across both._

“No. Not really.” He shifted slightly, allowing Joe to turn in his sleep and rest his ear against Nicky’s heart. He hoped it would be like the kitchen clock for him. Steady. Nicky had to be steady. He kept one hand at Joe’s hip, moved the other to his shoulder and then the nape of his neck. Stroked his thumb gently back and forth there. He could be steady.

Booker just nodded. They sat in silence for a bit, watching Joe sleep, the rise and fall of his chest, the lines of distress still visible around his eyes, the flush of slight fever to his skin as the drug finally- hopefully- left his system. 

If he had one more relapse, Nicky was fairly sure they’d have to take action and flush it out. He would have to send someone for an IV and supplies. And he’d have to prepare himself for Joe’s reaction to waking up attached to an IV. After Merrick’s lab? He didn’t know if it would be good. 

“Would it help if I apologized?” Booker asked then, as though he'd sensed the direction of Nicky's thoughts.

“For which transgression?” he remembered at the last second to keep his voice low.

“Do you want me to go in chronological or alphabetical order?” Booker countered right back. It was an attempt to lighten the mood, and it might have worked on someone else, might have even worked on Nicky three days ago, but not on the Nicky of right now. 

He tightened his hold on Joe just a little, laid the back of his hand against his cheek, then forehead, checking the fever. “Quynh was our sister. We loved her, and she loved us. Yet you’ve seen what she’s become now. Do you think, if we’d ended up trapped in a lab for five hundred years, we would turn out the same?”

At the way Booker’s face drained of color, he hadn’t. “That’s not-”

“No, you didn’t think that far ahead, did you?” He couldn’t allow his tone to get angry, couldn’t risk Joe hearing him upset and waking up. No. He was steady. “I think there’s a chance we might have. Five hundred years isolated and tortured, and then have no issue tearing each other or the world apart. And that’s something that will now keep me up at night.”

“I was in misery, Nicky. I can’t explain it any more than that,” he said helplessly.

“Yes, but I wasn’t in misery, and you knew that, and you still decided to put me there,” Nicky shook his head. “Was your misery worth mine? Joe’s? Or all of the people we’ve ever helped, or we’d miss out on saving in the future? It would have been worth their lives?” The tag on the back of Joe’s shirt was sticking out slightly, so he tucked it back in, smoothing his hand along Joe’s spine before going back to his neck, rubbing at the knots of stiff muscle still there. He must have been cuffed nearly the whole time he’d been taken. _His hands constantly trapped behind him, just that much more vulnerable, on_ Quynh’s _orders..._ “And see, you weren’t even going to get the end you wanted. I can’t believe you’d think they’d ever let us die, even if they figured out how to do it.”

“I don’t-”

“How could they ever divest of such profits,” he parroted words he’d heard at some point while strapped down on that bed, half-delirious with pain. “Not an iron coffin, but a white and sterile one. That was one of the worst things about it, you know.” Not being hurt, not seeing Joe be hurt- they’d gone through that before. “Being treated like a lab rat.” _A mouse_. “Being made to feel as less than human.” 

He’d spent enough of his life figuring out who he was as a person, reconciling certain parts of his past in order to truly be himself. To be able to have this family and the love of a wonderful, beautiful man. And for the last year, he’d been forced to think about how easily those doctors could have undone him, undone it all.

“I’m so sorry, Nicky.”

“Damn right you are. You should be.” He couldn’t close his eyes. If he did, he’d see the lab again, the syringes lined up on a tray. Or Quynh’s proud smile the first time the four of them were victorious in battle together. Or Joe’s face today in that tunnel, raw and hurt and untethered. Something shattered in his eyes. “You never even apologized to us. When it happened, or after…”

“I am now,” Booker insisted. “For more than you know.” At Nicky’s questioning look. “Merrick. Not warning everyone about Quynh. Not being able to stop her from hurting him.” He looked to Joe, sorrowful and contrite. “She said things to him, things I never would’ve thought he- she was away for five hundred years and picked at him so easily.”

_Pit viper in a fight_ , Joe always said. And then always laughed when she kicked him in the shin for it. “I’m not a priest, Booker. I won’t give you absolution.”

“I wasn’t thinking of this as Confession,” Booker shrugged half-heartedly. “I just… I’m sorry. I will make it right in any way I can.”

“How?” Nicky demanded, almost desperately. Almost helplessly. 

“I don’t know,” and damn him, he really was apologetic. “But I will.” Sincere. And Nicky trusted him. Maybe not with his life, maybe not just yet, but with… with something close to getting there. 

And for some reason, that pissed him off too. He just wanted things to be right. He wanted things to be good and just without any of them having to suffer for it; couldn't they just _have_ something, just have it?

“He loves you so much,” Booker continued, or started some new line of discussion, Nicky didn’t know yet. He kept silent, not sure if he could begin to cover the subject of _Joe_ in his current state. “It’s miraculous, what you feel for each other. Somewhere along the line, I forgot that you love the rest of us just as much. If in a different way. I’m sorry I was careless with that.”

It was too much, all too much. Nicky was about to drown in all of this, the anger and sorrow and conflicting need to forgive and need to punish and- was it all their fault that Quynh was this way?- and-

And Joe rescued him, as he always did. He groaned softly, interrupting them, the hand not latched onto Nicky’s shirt moving to pat at the mattress next to them, searching for something. Not finding whatever it was, he struggled to open his eyes, still sluggish, not fully able to lift his head from Nicky’s chest. “Joe?”

He looked to his empty hand on the mattress again, blinking and befuddled. “Where’s…?”

“I’m here,” Nile spoke up from the open doorway, just coming in from her watch. “Shift change.” She smiled a little at the sight of them before pointing to Booker. “You’re up.”

It took Booker a moment to register her appearance, and the time. He began to argue, like he wanted to keep going with this awful conversation, but Joe lifted a shaky hand and tried to mimic Nile’s pointing finger. “You have to. Mini-Boss is very strict about shift schedules.”

“You know the rules, Joe. Hundred meter wind sprints every time you give me lip about my schedules.” Her voice was warm and gentle though, as she set a bottle of water next to their bed.

“Mmhmm get right on that,” Joe waved clumsily, trying to smack her hand away when she knelt to check his forehead for the fever, only to have her smack his hand back in retaliation. Nicky allowed himself a smile too, decidedly not watching Booker climb out of the bed and head out for watch without giving another argument, without getting another recrimination. Those could wait. His anger could wait.

“Nicky,” and he almost startled at Nile’s touch to his shoulder. “That can’t be comfortable all night, man. Lay down with this fool, okay?”

He really loved Nile so much. She was so good to them. _With_ them. Whether it was his God or hers or Joe’s, or some other higher power (destiny) that had picked each of them for this calling, they’d done it right when they picked her.

He tried to use that love right now, countering and pushing back at his anger. Maybe this was how Joe did it all the time? Focusing on the matter and man at hand, he gave Nile a quick kiss to the cheek and shuffled down until he was off the headboard and on his back. She nodded in satisfaction and left them for the kitchen, and all was quiet once again. 

Joe immediately curled up in the space next to him, between Nicky and the wall, tangling his fingers back into the hem of his shirt. They stared at each other for a bit, unspoken words and reassurances and a few more questions than they could answer right now passing back and forth between them. Then Joe smiled that crooked smile, leaned in and kissed him on the tip of his nose. “My heart.”

They’d done it right picking him too.

He reached up to run a hand through Joe’s hair and pulled him in for a real kiss, sweet and slow like honey. “My love.” He kept his hand there, carding through in measured strokes, in time with the ticking clock. “Are you feeling any better?”

“With some things, yes. With many other things,” he just shook his head, smile turning small and sad. 

“I know,” he soothed. He may not know what exactly that drug had felt like, and he may not know what Quynh had said to him to make Booker _that_ reluctant to leave his side, but he knew Joe. He knew when he was hurting. “What can I do?”

Joe shook his head again, leaned in to rest (hide) his face in Nicky’s neck. “Nothing more or less than you always do.”

He kissed his forehead, left his mouth pressed there. “This doesn’t feel like an ‘always’ situation,” he murmured against skin that was still slightly flushed with fever.

A sigh, very soft, blew against his collar. “It’s not.” He switched, probably without realizing, into his own Arabic. “She made me feel so wrong, Nicolò. So… wrong. Weak.”

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath, held him closer, answered in his own tongue. “She’s not our Quynh anymore, love. Or not right now, at least.” He had to leave that open, had to keep hope stored somewhere. “She’s the one who is wrong.”

Ever obstinate, his Yusuf, who shook his head now even while burrowing further into the embrace. “She said those things to get a rise out of me, to _make_ me doubt. And it _worked_. And so, she wasn’t wrong. I’m too…” he stopped, shook his head again, at himself this time. “She could do it again. Come at us this way again. She knows I’m a weak-.”

“ _No,_ ” he lifted Joe’s chin, made him raise his eyes to meet his own. “Not weak. Never weak. You are our _soul_ , Yusuf. Not just mine. All of ours. We’re warriors because of Andy, but we’re human because of you. That makes us strong.” 

It was something Nile had pointed out one night after about six too many drinks- Nicky was the heart that guided why they fought; Joe was the soul that guided how they lived. (And both Joe and Nicky were silently grateful that Nile had become that beacon twice-over for Andy, who’d had a millennia of experience tuning out Nicky’s morality and Joe’s ardor.) 

But now, Joe could barely look him in the eyes, and he could see the sheen to them, tears that wouldn’t fall. “She touched me and called me sweetheart and then tore me to shreds with a smile on her face.”

“Yusuf,” he had to touch Joe himself now, cupping his face and tracing a cheekbone with his thumb. 

“I didn’t even fight it. Book did. He argued, tried to. I just lay there and let her say those things-” he stopped and forced himself to breathe in time with movement of Nicky’s thumb. “I’m sorry. It’s- I’m okay. I will be. Just, my memory of… She used to recite poetry, do you remember?”

He offered a smile, because he knew that’s what Joe wanted. “I remember.” She and Joe used to spend hours while they traveled, trading poems from different languages and lands back and forth, making up new ones. Trying to one-up each other, see who could get Nicky to blush first with some scandalous verse. (Joe had been leading, 167 to 43, by the time Nicky finally got his reactions under control.)

“That used to be my… it’s not my abiding memory of her anymore. All the moments in our lives I can and can’t keep- this will stay with me now. I hate it.” He closed his eyes. “Part of me? Part of me thought we were still going to find her and rescue her. Still. That’s what we’re supposed to do, that’s why we’re here. To- to save people. To do the right thing. But there’s no way to make this right, is there?” 

“There is,” Nicky whispered. “There has to be. We just don’t know what it is yet.” If he didn’t kill her first, for putting that look- that doubt- in Joe’s eyes. “Come here, please.” He pulled him in close again, pressed their foreheads together. “You’re allowed to not feel your best right now. Don’t apologize to me for that. Ever.” One of his hands drifted down to Joe’s forearm, where the injection mark was still frustratingly visible. “You are the strongest person I’ve met in my long, long life.”

Joe huffed a laugh, then chased it to Nicky’s lips and kissed him once more. “You’re biased.”

Another kiss. “About you?” Another. “Never.” And another. “How dare you accuse me of such a thing.” He ducked his head a little, and this time Joe was able to meet his eyes. “It’s only that I know you that well, Yusuf. Better than anyone. Better than her.” And the fact that Quynh thought she could take that, _ruin_ it, that Booker hadn’t cared enough about them to-

Joe searched his face intently, studying like he sometimes did before he got the itch to draw something. And his frown deepened. “Something’s wrong?” 

His heart could burst for this man. “Now’s not the time.”

“The time is whenever you need it,” Joe insisted.

He shook his head, bringing Joe in once more, cradling him close. “Right now, I just need this.” He brushed a kiss into those curls, willing them both to relax somehow. Be steady. “I’m trying not to give in to this anger. You, safe, here with me, is what I need.”

“Anger?” There wasn’t shock or recrimination or anything in his tone. It was more prompting, prodding, he wanted Nicky to keep talking. 

Because he loved him, but also, _he doesn’t want to fall back asleep_ , Nicky realized. Maybe he was afraid of another memory showing up, or afraid of waking up back in that cell. Or maybe they were all feeling so unbalanced right now that sleep seemed impossible. 

Either way, Nicky wasn’t going to allow that. Joe needed to rest, to regain his strength and give this day an actual end. Otherwise they were going to get into Sleep Deprived Joe territory, where grumpy one-word replies would then be replaced by furrowed eyebrows just visible over a coffee cup. And it wouldn’t get better until he slept.

He rolled onto his back, keeping ahold of Joe so he was resting on top of him. “I am angry. At Quynh. And Booker still. And God, probably.” One hand on Joe’s hip, the other at the nape of his neck, kneading slowly. It had worked before, it would work again. “At you, for making me somewhat tense the last few days.”

Joe hummed softly at the touch. “I suppose we all deserve it, to varying degrees.” He slipped one hand under Nicky’s shirt to lay flat against his stomach, providing comfort in turn. “Are you angry that I don’t hate Book anymore?”

“You never hated him,” Nicky rolled his eyes, because they both knew that. “You were hurt and upset, as you should have been. And now, you two have just gone through something horrific and got through it together. Of course your feelings are different than mine.” He scratched at his scalp lightly, soothing. “And no matter what, I’d never be angry about that. Your undeterred capacity for love.”

He sighed again, just a little. “And if tomorrow I wake up and I’m pissed at him all over again?”

“That’s allowed,” he smiled. “Not unexpected, I imagine. This is all very complicated, Yusuf, it doesn’t get fixed by one near-many-deaths-experience.” And found his smile getting wider at the playful bite to his chest he could feel through his shirt. He tugged at a few curls in response. “Incorrigible.”

“You encourage it,” Joe countered. Then paused, looking up at him. “You never like being angry.”

“It doesn’t happen that often,” he explained. Or maybe argued. Either way, he was absolutely sure that he did _not_ sound petulant about it. At all. 

Or maybe it didn’t matter, if Joe was going to look up at him like that with his chin perched on Nicky’s collarbone, the lines around his eyes not drawn from despair for the first time tonight, but crinkling from a soft smile instead. “No, it doesn’t. Which is why I worry.”

He traced those lines with gentle fingers, delighted in them, even as he tightened his grip on Joe with the other hand. “Ah, yes, of the two of us, you’re definitely the one who gets to be worried after today.”

Joe turned his face to catch his fingers in a kiss. “We share.”

“We share,” Nicky echoed his words, and echoed his smile. “That’s how I know I’ll be fine. I have you to remind me of how to be happy again.” He brushed Joe’s hair away from his face. “And I know you’ll be fine, because I’ll be with you while you sleep.” 

His smile faltered a little at that. “Nicolò…”

He hated that fear, wanted retribution for it being there, and it was a small reminder that he himself wasn’t at his best yet either. “We both need it,” he pitched his voice lower. “Nile and Andy are here with us. Booker is out front. The sun will rise tomorrow, there’s nothing more that can be done tonight. Please?”

He knew it was the ‘please’ that won it for him- it always did. Nearly a thousand years, and he was still fairly sure Joe hadn’t caught on to what a pushover he was if Nicky widened his eyes a fraction and said ‘please.’ Either way, Nicky got what he wanted, and he saw absolutely no reason to ever bring it up.

Joe settled back down against him now, resting his ear over Nicky’s heart once more, his arms as fully wrapped around Nicky’s torso as he could comfortably get them. Nicky moved to his normal position on the occasions they slept like this- one hand in Joe’s hair, the other tucked under his shirt to lay just so at the base of his spine. Secure. They were safe. 

“I love you. And I will also love you when you wake up tomorrow, no matter what the day brings.” he brought his voice down to whisper. “Rest now.” He looked over the curve of Joe’s shoulder to Nile as she crept back into the room and her own bed. He didn’t have to wonder at how much she’d overheard or understood, judging by her pained attempt at a smile. Her grasp of languages was getting much better. They exchanged a quick nod, an understanding. 

Thankfully Joe was oblivious, already slipping back into sleep no matter how much he wanted to fight it. “You are the best thing in this world,” he mumbled, nuzzling his face into soft fabric of Nicky’s shirt. “Above anything else that I am, I am lucky. To be in it with you.”

And with Joe like that, almost healthy, almost okay, still impossibly loving and eternally beautiful, Nicky could feel some of the darkness in his thoughts fading away. He laid his head back with the beginnings of a deep breath, a soft smile, and an eased mind.

And a steady heartbeat.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks so much for reading!! And for all the kudos and comments, I really really appreciate them <3
> 
> EDIT: Now with a sequel! [When The Scorched Of The Earth Come Back By Sea](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27871253)


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